The sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation will no doubt prompt further reconsideration of the ways in which the interrelationships of race, slavery, emancipation and colonization were understood during the Civil War. The positions held by Abraham Lincoln at various points during his presidency, of course, can hardly be detached from this enterprise, but both the specialist scholar and the curious undergraduate will benefit enormously from these two books. Both, in their own respective ways, are exemplary.

Henry Louis Gates's long introduction offers a judicious appraisal that can assume a place in a distinguished lineage of sophisticated African American analyses of Lincoln. These run from Frederick Douglass's provocative Oration at the Freedman's Monument in 1876, through W. E. B Du Bois's brief, though deeply insightful, observations in 1922 editorials for The Crisis, to the pioneering work of Morgan State historian Benjamin Quarles, author of Lincoln and the Negro (1962).

Whilst never backing away from criticism of Lincoln – the treatment of the President's use of humour and racial epithets is especially well handled in this respect – Gates's assessment is underwritten by an acceptance that, for Lincoln, “slavery”, “race” and “colonization” “were quite often separate issues” (xx). This capacity for “compartmentalization” is a crucial element in understanding Lincoln and explains why his deep revulsion at the institution of slavery never interfered with what he and most northerners regarded as the primary initial aim of the war: to preserve the union. Gates's introduction makes up for in acumen what it perhaps lacks in concision, there being a tendency towards reiteration. We are told, for example, of Lincoln's description of African American recruits as his “black warriors” more than once (xxvi, xli, xlvi, 1).

The relevant texts are well selected and range from the canonical speeches in which race and/or slavery are discussed to less-well-known correspondence (wit political friends and foes alike) in which Lincoln often first articulated his views. These are chronologically arranged, which provides a clear sense of what several contemporary historians have described as Lincoln's “growth” on certain race- and slavery-related issues. They are also accompanied by detailed, but succinct, contextualizing headnotes, presumably supplied by the book's “co-editor,” Donald Yacovone, who, alas, would appear to be a victim of his partner's academic celebrity, his name banished from the book's cover to the title page, where it appears in lower font.

The co-authors of Colonization after Emancipation present a more historically telescoped view of Lincoln's political evolution, being concerned exclusively with earlier historians' habit of presuming that the Emancipation Proclamation put an end to Lincoln's interest in colonization projects. Claims of Lincoln's “growth” and “capacity for change” appear problematic in this context as Magness and Page, unearthing fresh documents from hitherto obscure locations, point to the consistency of his support for a variety of colonization projects. These ranged from efforts to secure, via diplomacy and financial negotiation, territory for resettlement in British Honduras; Île à Vache, off the coast of Haiti; and Chiriquí in Panama.

The transnational ambit of the study, imposed by these factors, ultimately yields a persuasive, if not quite conclusive, argument. It is clear, in any case, that numerous interdepartmental memoranda of the British Colonial and Foreign Office and US consular records in Belize and British Guiana shed a rather different light on the Lincoln administration's postwar plans for free blacks (inchoate as they were then and remained even until the President's death). The authors, nonetheless, in the end disdain an iconoclastic approach, acknowledging the “complex and paradoxical” nature of the colonization question at the time (127). They surmise that, by the end of the war, the policy's “final disposition [was] known only to him,” but, given the chaotic state of the nation and Lincoln's own desire to somehow reconcile competing visions of postwar “reconstruction,” it is perhaps doubtful that even this was the case (127).